The Hellenistic World and Rome
Theodosius II and Valentinian III ruled that Berytus also should have the title
ofmetropolis. Tyre, they say, should not feel that her dignity was impaired:
‘‘Let her [Tyre] be mother of the province [mater provinciae]bythebeneficium
[favour] of our ancestors, and Berytus by ours’’ (CJ, , ). ‘‘Mother of the
province’’ is a distinctive (though not unique) term, which might reflect the
Phoenician expression ’M ṢDNM—‘‘mother of the Sidonians,’’ which had
appeared on the coins of Tyre in the Seleucid period, six centuries before.
In any case, if the inscriptions of the Roman period (so far at least) hardly
reveal any Phoenician elements, the coins certainly do. It is true that it is only
in the Hellenistic period that the coins carry intelligible legends in Phoe-
nician. But under the Roman Empire the coins of Sidon and Tyre continue
to show occasional whole words, and very frequently individual Phoenician
letters; and in the case of Tyre these persist up to the late second century..^43
That need not of course mean very much in terms of the survival of lan-
guage. The letters could even have been a fossilised feature which no longer
conveyed any specific meaning. But even so, once again, they did nothaveto
be used. The fact that they were at least reflects a consciousness of continuity
with a city’s Phoenician past.
But was that all? The answer depends on whether we put any degree of
trust in what our literary sources tell us.
According to Josephus, Tyre possessed archives which went back to the
period of Hiram and Solomon. A number of passages in theAntiquitiesand
Against Apionuse their evidence as support for the authenticity of the Old
Testament narrative. In most cases Josephus claims to be dependent on Hel-
lenistic writers who had translated these documents, namely Menander of
Ephesus (Ant.,C. Ap. , –;Ant. , –) or Dius (Ant.,–
;C. Ap. , –). But inAnt. , he is more explicit about the preser-
vation of these documents: ‘‘To this day there remain copies of these letters,
preserved not only in our books, but also by the Tyrians, so that if anyone
wished to learn the exact truth, he would, by inquiring of the public offi-
cials in charge of the Tyrian archives [gazophylakion] find that their records
are in agreement with what we have said’’ (Loeb trans.). Of course there
are many difficulties about this. Josephus may still be repeating a Hellenistic
source; and even if a Hellenistic writer truthfully related having translated
a document preserved at Tyre, that document may itself have been a his-
torical forgery. Moreover, the contents of the archives at Tyre are always, as
quoted, alarmingly early. No one claims to have used a continuous archive
coming down through the Persian and Hellenistic periods; the furthest we
. SeeBMC Phoenicia, – (Sidon); – (Tyre).